The Scarlet Letter
(1995)

Can there be a greater test of cinematic endurance than staying awake
through Roland Joffe's "freely adapted" version of THE SCARLET LETTER?
Try Demi Moore as Hester Prynne, revisioned here as a New Age, New
World Wonder Woman. (She's well-read, well-spoken, and, as the camera
takes great pains to show us, well-endowed.) Her partner-in-sin is
played by Gary Oldman, as the impassioned Reverend Dimmesdale. (She
spies him skinny dipping and, unfortunately, so do we.)
Relentlessly straight-played, THE SCARLET LETTER is bad costume drama
at its lowest. How low? The awfulness includes a love scene with an
onlooking slave girl "pleasuring herself," a bloody scalps-and-all
Indian attack, and what appears to be the discovery of Hawthorne's
long-lost, original ending that sends the adulterers away to live
happily ever after in the "faraway Carolinas."
What, Nags Head? Beaufort?? Myrtle Beach???
Grade: D
Copyright 1995 by Michael J. Legeros